Statistical excellence in journalism

The above photo shows David Rhodes of BBC Yorkshire receiving the ‘Regional Journalism’ award from RSS Vice president for external affairs, Dr Jennifer Rogers at the RSS 2017 awards ceremony.

About our awards

We established our awards for statistical excellence in journalism in 2007 to encourage excellence in journalists’ use of statistics to question, analyse and investigate the issues that affect society. The awards have previously been scooped by reporters from the BBC, the Financial Times and BuzzFeed and celebrate the great strides that have been made in journalist’s use of numbers to tell a story.

Criteria

Entries will be expected to show integrity in their presentation, explanation and use of statistics – avoiding distortion and highlighting the extent of uncertainties. Please note we can only accept submissions for work completed in 2016.

The awards are open to all journalists (print, online and broadcast), including those based outside the UK. All entries will be judged equally and each journalist may submit a maximum of three entries.

The winners for the 2017 awards have now been announced, we will launch the 2018 awards later this year – please check this page for updates.

Categories

The categories for 2017 were as follows:

Explaining the Facts: recognising journalism that has dissected important statistics to make them more accessible and understandable to the wider public.
Investigative Journalism: recognising journalism that has used original research and analysis of data to uncover a story.
Regional Journalism: recognising the excellent use of data and promotion of the role of statistics in society in local or regional media.
Data Visualisation: recognising the use of creative visual representation to illustrate complex data.